Year: 2018

(Conversation) – In July, Gap launched its back to school advertising campaign featuring a group of children of colour from P.S. 153 in Harlem, New York, including a young girl wearing a hijab. The ad spurred positive media coverage for its celebratory inclusivity and a massive virulent debate on social media. Many applauded Gap’s decision, which they perceived as empowering women and girls around the world. Some who wear hijabs or wore hijabs shared the struggles they faced to find comfortable clothing in middle and high school. Hamida Ahmed, a…

(Conversation) – Dress code policies have always been prevalent in schools. Normally, what children can and cannot wear in schools is explicitly noted in school policies or implicitly implied by broader cultural and societal norms. The issue of the vast and sometimes exhaustive list of dress code policies of what cannot be worn has not had any resolution across localities and countries. The problem with trying to develop a set of guidelines for school dress code policies is that the implementation or restriction of dress is just not about the…

Guatemala (OpenDemocracy) – The fruit seller, the tortilla maker, the domestic worker, the nanny. These are the Marías of Guatemala. Indigenous women, who continue to wear traditional Mayan dress. They are seemingly considered undeserving, of an identity or even a name of their own; valued only to the extent to which they serve others. It doesn’t matter if they are teachers, lawyers, academics or doctors, if they are wearing their Mayan huipil and corte they are considered part of the ‘servile class.’ Strangers have no shame in asking them to clean…

United States (Conversation) – Many people think that human trafficking means kidnapping and moving victims across state or national borders. After working with human trafficking victims as a forensic nurse and now while teaching at Texas A&M University’s College of Nursing, I know that this often is not the case. I have found that many perpetrators find, entice and sell their victims right in their own backyards. Victims are often hidden in plain sight, leading everyone from police to health professionals to miss clues to their plight and vastly underestimate…

United States (TexasTribune) – Former Texas prosecutor Guy James Gray keeps a 20-year-old CD in his desk that documents with graphic photos one of the most vicious hate crimes in history – the day James Byrd Jr. was beaten, stripped naked, tied to the back of a truck by three men from the Ku Klux Klan and dragged down a dirt road until he was dead and decapitated. “When you handle a case like that and get inside the mind of a real racist, a white supremacist racist, and you see…

United States (Sunlight) – The Office of Refugee Resettlement removed its staff directory from its website, likely between October and December of last year. The change came just before the political firestorm over the Trump administration’s family separation policy at the border and accusations that the office has failed to communicate transparently with the public during the controversy. The Web Integrity Project’s latest report documents the takedown of an entire page containing staff contact information from the website of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the office within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that…